


Put Your Mouth Over The Stupid Things We're Taught We Ought To Say

by inlovewithnight



Category: Bandom, Cobra Starship, My Chemical Romance
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-03
Updated: 2010-06-03
Packaged: 2017-10-18 03:04:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/184305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight





	Put Your Mouth Over The Stupid Things We're Taught We Ought To Say

Gabe wakes up drunk, holding on to the bed for dear life and hoping he's not about to die. He's had nightmares about that, lately. Waking up confused and disoriented and then a few minutes later, dead. Sometimes there's symbolism and shit.

"Drink this."

Gabe shakes his head and tries to crawl down underneath the pillows. They smell like stale sweat and a bunch of hair products that he doesn't use. Possibly this isn't his bed.

"Dude. It's water. Come on."

Water might help. He opens one eye and peeks out from under the pillow, swallowing a whimper before the world comes into focus and he realizes it's Mikey Way standing there looking at him like he's the world's saddest example of the morning after the night before.

"Kill me," Gabe mumbles. Mikey shakes his head and takes the pillow away.

"I watch CSI," he says. "I can't come up with a genius plan. They'll catch me for sure, and you're great and all, man, but I'm not going to prison for you."

"Understandable." Gabe presses the heels of his hands against his eyes. "I might not even go to prison for me."

Mikey doesn't say anything, just stands there holding the water and watching Gabe in his unwavering way.

"What did we even do last night?" Gabe asks eventually, taking the glass. "Was it a good party? Did I bag any hot chicks?"

"We got kicked out of two bars." Mikey shrugs. "And, well, you came home with me. So...whatever that's worth."

Gabe squints at him. "You're, like...three-quarters of a hot chick."

"Thanks. That means a lot, coming from you."

They sit in silence for a few minutes, while Gabe drinks his water and Mikey chews on his thumbnail. "Did we hook up?" Gabe asks finally. He's fully dressed, so it doesn't seem likely, but, well, shit happens, especially around Mikeyway.

"You were pretty out of it. It was a hell of a wake."

"A wake?"

"That's what you kept telling everyone." Mikey shrugs again and shoves his hands in his pockets. "You did a lot of yelling about how we were gathered to mourn and celebrate the death of Midtown."

Gabe closes his eyes and flops back against the bed. "Oh."

"That's why we got kicked out of the first place, actually. These guys didn't give a shit about Midtown, and told you so, and you took it personally."

"What about the second place?"

"You threw up on the DJ."

"Did they deserve it?"

"Oh yeah."

Gabe has to laugh. He's lying in some other guy's bed, nowhere near his own apartment, he feels like shit, and he has no band. But at least he punished a bad DJ with vomit. "Shit, man."

"Don't worry about it."

"Kind of a dick move."

"Shit happens." The bed shifts under Mikey's weight, and his hand settles lightly on Gabe's chest. Gabe opens his eyes and looks up at him. Mikey's smiling a little, but his eyes are dark and a serious, studying Gabe like there's a puzzle there and he's almost got it figured out. Gabe shakes his head a little, silently asking Mikey not to find the answer. He can't take it right now.

"You want to go to the diner?" Mikey asks.

God bless those little-brother skills of interpreting bullshit angst. "I need sunglasses."

"Wuss."

"Seriously, I think I might die."

"We'll figure something out." Mikey taps him on the chest, then stands and offers him his hand. "C'mon. I'll buy the coffee."  
**  
By the time they get to the diner, it's actually after noon, and there's a pretty heavy lunch crowd filling up the place. Mikey knows the hostess--big fucking surprise; Mikey knows _everybody_ \--so they don't have to wait very long. But even ten minutes of sitting on a sticky vinyl bench watching normal people eating on their lunch break kind of freaks Gabe out. He might have to _be_ a normal person now. He might have to get a job that requires him to be awake before two in the afternoon _consistently_ , and to only take an hour for lunch, and to wear a _uniform_. Fuck.

"I will kill myself," he mumbles against Mikey's shoulder, closing his eyes tight. "I swear I will."

"Not right now," Mikey says. "Jenna's going to get us a good table."

"But after we eat, I can?"

"If you really have to. But I'd prefer it if you didn't."

"Because you'd miss me?"

"Because I'd be the last person who saw you, and that's a lot of questions and bullshit and stuff."

Gabe frowns and picks his head up a little, squinting at Mikey. "Seriously?"

"Your family would come find me, wanting to know your state of mind and all that shit. They'd cry. I'd be uncomfortable."

Gabe sits up and runs his fingers through his hair, dragging it back from his face until his skin hurts. "You're kind of ice-cold, Mikeyway."

"You're kind of melodramatic, G-man."

"Blow me."

"Not in front of Jenna. She might get the wrong idea."

Gabe snorts and kicks Mikey in the ankle. Mikey kicks him back, harder, maintaining effortless eye contact with Jenna the whole time. The unflappable cool of the exotic Mikeyway in his natural habitat; Gabe has to admire the act. It's pretty damn clear that he couldn't pull it off if he tried, not without sometimes getting sidetracked into puking on DJs.

They don't say much while they eat, just let the grease and coffee settle into their bloodstreams with matching little groans of pleasure. Gabe can feel Mikey watching him thoughtfully, but every time he looks up and tries to catch him in the act, Mikey's already looked away, at his plate of waffles or at Jenna or at the little flier on the table advertising a classic-car show or something.

Finally he soaks his last square of toast in hot sauce and shoves it in his mouth, chewing slowly and watching Mikey lick powdered sugar off his fingers. "Guess you've probably got places to be," he says. "Things to do."

Mikey shrugs. "Got a couple of things on the agenda. I'll catch you later, though."

"Maybe I should lay low for a while. Not get myself in trouble."

"You didn't get in trouble."

"I might not always have your charm and pretty face around to use as cover."

Mikey smiles and arches his hips up to dig his wallet out of his pocket. "Happy to be of service. But like I said, I'll catch you later. For sure."

Gabe can't really think of any good reason to argue with that, so he nods and puts his own money down. Mikey hugs him goodbye at the door, a fast, bony squeeze that lingers just a beat longer than it has to, and Gabe's breath threatens to catch in his throat. He can't fucking deal with people being nice to him, sometimes.

His apartment isn't any smaller or emptier or more shitty than it was yesterday, or the day before, or when he had a band, but it feels like it. He strips down in the living room and flees to the shower, scrubs the sweat and hangover off himself, then switches his phone to vibrate and climbs into bed. If he's going to have to join the normal working world, he's going to enjoy the fuck out of his last stretch of freedom, by sleeping through as much of it as possible.

That turns out to be about three hours. He wakes up with a sour taste in his mouth, a headache at the back of his skull, and restless energy crawling under his skin with no idea of where to direct it. He gathers up his laundry, cleans his kitchen, and tries a couple of the yoga moves illustrated on pages he tore out of one of his stepbrother's girlfriend's magazines. Every couple of months he takes another whack at yoga. Every time it ends the same way, with him lying on the couch nursing a pulled something or other and watching shitty TV.

Tonight it's _Animal Cops_ , and he's lying there huddled under a blanket and hating the fact that people who hurt puppies even _exist_ when he hears his phone rattle across his bedside table and thunk to the floor. It's way past done ringing by the time he drags himself off the couch and limps across the apartment to get to it, and he's not quite sure why he bothers, except that he's suddenly, pathetically hungry for even the shred of human contact of a voice mail.

Except there _is_ no voice mail. Fucking Mikey Way. He calls and expects other people to come running.

Which Gabe does, because again, pathetic, but he fully intends to be an asshole about it when Mikey picks up.

"G. Saporta," Mikey says by way of answer, and then before Gabe can execute his plan, "I have a proposition for you."

Gabe hobbles back toward the couch. "Should've done that last night while I was drunk and at your mercy, man."

"A business proposition."

"You don't have a business."

"Funny. You're a funny guy. Everybody likes that about you."

"That's not what they tell me to my face." He eases down to the couch with a whimper. "I'm listening."

"We're going out on tour. Six weeks. Across the middle...ish...South and then Southwest. Kinda."

Gabe frowns at his phone. "Um. Good for you?"

"Fucker." Mikey sighs. "Come with us."

"And do what, exactly?"

He says it like it should be obvious. "Tech for me."

"I'm not a tech."

"You know how to do set-up. And tune a bass. And, like, hand me shit. I think you can handle it."

"Until recently, I was being teched _for_."

"Dude? I'm not trying to be a douche. And you know that. Because _you're_ not a douche and you know that it's fucking hard work."

"Don't you _have_ a tech?"

"He's got family shit. It's complicated. Come with us."

"Why me?"

"Because it's better for you than getting thrown out of bars and moping in your shitty apartment. Come with us."

"I don't know."

"You don't have anything else to do."

"Asshole." He looks around his apartment. It really is shitty. "Will you pay me?"

"I guess you could call it that."

Gabe rolls his eyes. He is familiar with shoelace tours. "I'm not bunking with Gerard. Ever."

"Fair enough." Mikey hangs up, and Gabe sits there blinking at his phone.

"What the fuck?" he mutters at the Animal Cops. "What the actual fucking fuck. Teching for My Chemical Romance. My fucking life."  
**  
Being on the flip side of tour life is weird and kind of infuriating and possibly exactly what he needs right now. He's got plenty of time to think, but whenever it veers too close to too _much_ time, when he's just about ready to tear the top of his head off and start screaming at the top of his lungs, there's a show to get ready for and he has a job to do.

And it's not a bad gig. Mikey isn't exactly demanding; as long as his stuff is somewhere on the right of the stage, his bass is somewhere in the vicinity of tuned, and everything's taped down well enough that Frank won't trip and accidentally smash either of their skulls in, Mikey's happy. Gabe does better than those minimums, just on general principles, but it's nice not to feel pressured.

The trickiest part of the job, such as it is, is the pre-show ritual, which involves waiting for Mikey to successfully sneak out of the dressing room and text him a location, then showing up with two vodka tonics (mostly vodka, just a splash of tonic) for Mikey to down in rapid succession while staring up at the ceiling and muttering to himself.

"This must've been a lot easier when you could just drink in the dressing room."

Mikey shrugs and downs the second drink, brow furrowing a little. "Jesus, you go for the cheap shit, Saporta."

"Gets you drunk faster."

"Makes me want to puke. Again."

"I've never known you to be picky about your booze, dude." That gets him another shrug and a slight tilt of the head that he translates as _yeah, okay_. "Seriously, though, wouldn't it be easier to have Gerard leave instead?"

"He's warming up. He needs to concentrate." Mikey tilts his head back again, teeth worrying his lower lip. "Fuck, fuck, fuck."

For the first few weeks of the tour, Gabe had pretended not to notice the more distressed parts of Mikey's pre-show routine, politely looking away or just gathering up the glasses and heading back out front. A few nights ago, though, he said fuck it and started giving in to his impulses.

He steps up behind Mikey and wraps his arms around him loosely, tugging Mikey back against his chest and resting his chin on Mikey's shoulder. "You'll be awesome."

"Yeah." Mikey nods and leans back into him. "Two more minutes?"

Gabe could point out that he has the same place to be as Mikey does, but he just nods, breathing slowly against Mikey's ear and wrinkling his nose a little against the smell of sweat and hair gel.

It's a little weird, how easily he and Mikey have fallen into playing off each other on this tour. They've known each other for years, but always casual, at a distance, recognizing a kindred spirit of wanting _more than this_ across the crowded rooms of the scene, and beyond that, recognizing the little bit of spark that meant they might actually _get_ there.

They drank together, they partied together, they fooled around once or twice after drinking and partying. He played My Chem songs at his DJ gigs, and Mikey wore Midtown shirts on stage, but those weren't signals of any special friendship, just mutually and separately pointing out stuff coming out of their little universe that didn't suck.

Then again, maybe it isn't weird at all that this is easy. There's no weight to it, no significance or maybes. It's like those worn-out t-shirts they're both pulling out of duffel bags every morning, familiar and reminding of home and ultimately disposable.

Mikey's phone buzzes in his pocket and he sighs, bumping his head back against Gabe's shoulder. "Gotta go."

"Knock 'em dead." Gabe lets him go and steps back, flashing a double thumbs-up. "Give 'em hell, kid, even."

Mikey flips him off and jogs back toward the dressing room. Gabe moves up to his spot stageside, shoving his hands in the pockets of his jeans. He isn't sure if he wants to get used to the view from over here.

His job is to watch Mikey, a lot more than ever would have occurred to him otherwise. There wasn't any reason to watch, normally;everybody knew Mikeyway exactly as well as anybody needed to know him. He was funny, friendly, up for anything, a fun guy--except when he wasn't. He went a little jagged, a little moody, a little dark. But a few drinks usually shook him out of it, or else he called it quits early and took a bottle home. Mikeyway was never a strain on the system. Have fun or fuck off, that was the motto.

Gabe always approved of that approach. It's being professional, only at fucking around and getting loaded instead of at a job.

Out here on the road, it's a little different. He watches Mikey onstage every night, how his hands move over his bass, how he rocks in and out of the energy that comes off the crowd. He moves with it, it's under his skin. Gabe feels like he has a split-screen view of Mikey, onstage and off, Mikeyway Plugged and Unplugged. There's Mikey who glows electric under the lights and there's Mikey gulping vodka against stage fright, Mikey who has music flowing through his veins and Mikey who lies curled around himself in his bunk like he's holding something together with his body.

Gabe's supposed to be watching. He's not responsible for what he sees.  
**  
After the set he's stripping down the stage, winding up cords and flipping shit with the other techs. Nothing real, just jerking each other around, and then a voice comes from the not-quite-empty floor.

"Aren't you the Midtown guy?"

Gabe looks up, missing a loop with the cord he's coiling and punching himself in the arm. "What?"

The kid--no, not a kid, he's probably Gabe's own age, standing in the pit and looking up skeptically at the stage. "You. Midtown guy. Right?"

Gabe's stomach twists. He doesn't know what he's going to say until it's out in the air. "No, man. Not me."

"C'mon. I saw you guys like five times. You're what's his name. Saporta."

The other techs are looking at Gabe with real amusement, waiting for the joke to break. Gabe's chest feels tight, like his breath's being sucked out of him instead of inhaled in. What the fuck, they never even toured around here. Fucking shithole middle of nowhere.

"No, man," he says again. "Not me. You got--"

"That's his cousin," says Mikey, coming up behind Gabe's shoulder. "You're thinking of Gabriel. This is--" His eyes flick to Gabe's face, mild, considering. "Alejandro."

"That's right," Gabe says after a minute. He still feels sick but there's an upside to it, too, a what-the-hell thrill. "I'm the black sheep of the family."

"What about the one in prison?" Mikey says, raising an eyebrow. "Rafael, right?"

Gabe gives him a warning look, because even under the circumstances there is only so much bullshit he's willing to take, and Mikey's face cracks in his ridiculous overbite smile. Gabe pokes him in the side and Mikey turns his head to hide his giggles.

"Oh," the kid says, utterly lost. "Well, uh...sorry, I guess."

"I'll tell him he has a fan, the next time I see him."

"Tell him he's a fucking cocksucker for breaking up the band."

Ice shoots through Gabe's chest, and his brain whites out for a minute--coming up with a quick, vicious comeback is a survival skill he learned young, and it's not fucking fair but it just fucking figures that it would abandon him now.

Mikey's fingers curl around his wrist and tug him back toward the side-stage. "Bye now," he says dismissively over his shoulder. "Go buy a t-shirt." He steers Gabe to the door. "C'mon, man."

"I gotta finish up."

"Let the other guys get it. It's cool." Mikey squeezes his wrist, enough that Gabe can feel his own pulse pounding.

Gabe doesn't say anything, just lets himself be pulled along. After a minute, Mikey squeezes again and says "You do have a cousin in prison, right?"

"No, asshole."

"Huh."

"Rafael? Seriously?"

"Hey, I was being creative."

"You were thinking of the fucking Ninja Turtles. Don't lie."

Mikey shrugs slightly, that stupid smile breaking out again. "Maybe. Who cares?" He drops Gabe's arm and zips up his sweatshirt. "Let's get fucked up."  
**  
Getting fucked up is easy, always the easy part. From there it's more than easy, it's inevitable, how they slide together on the dance floor, pressed hot and close under the lights and the beat. This is their church, their favorite kind of prayer to sin, all heat and movement and chemicals flowing under the surface sweat. This is how they give their thanks.

Gabe's world blurs in and out, losing bits and pieces of time in the waves of color and sound. He tilts his head back and draws in a deep breath, filling his chest with the warm spring-damp air of wherever they are, USA. When he focuses back on the world again, Mikey is pushing him back against a wall and kissing him.

They're outside; he isn't sure when that happened, it must fit somewhere in one of the missing bits of time. They're standing on rough asphalt, and the air smells like trash. Probably behind the bar or somewhere like it, then. A fucking alley. "Such a cliché, dude."

"Not a cliché." Mikey's teeth scrape against Gabe's jaw, sharper than the burn of his stubble. "A classic."

Gabe loves arguing semantics like he loves few other things, but one of those things is making out, so he just nods and catches Mikey's mouth again, sliding his tongue deep and tasting the echoes of what Mikey's been drinking. Mikey presses up against him, his body a long line of heat, and Gabe groans, his hands sliding to Mikey's hips.

Mikey laughs, his teeth catching Gabe's lower lip this time and biting just a little. "You want?" he says, not really asking Gabe as he answers himself in the next breath. "Yeah. Want to..." His fingers move to Gabe's fly, popping the button and sliding the zipper easily before getting his hand inside.

Mikey shifts over, pressing his own dick against Gabe’s thigh and thrusting slowly. His hand is warm, calluses sliding rough over the sensitive skin and making Gabe shiver. His head is still spinning, filled with white noise and colored lights, and it’s easy to surrender everything, to lean back against the wall and roll his hips up into Mikey’s hand while Mikey grinds against him and breathes hot and broken into his mouth.

"Fuck," Mikey whispers when he eases away, wiping his hand on the wall and then on his jeans.

Gabe closes his eyes and takes another deep breath. His mouth is hot and swollen from kissing, and his lips taste like Mikey’s sweat, salt and a little smoke. "Need another drink."

"We should probably get back." Mikey’s fingers brush over Gabe’s shoulder and Gabe opens his eyes, watching the blurry outline of Mikey moving against the distant streetlights until Mikey steps closer and drops his head to rest on Gabe’s shoulder.

"Why do we do the shit we do, Mikeyway?" It’s not really a question. People have been asking him variations on it his whole life, and _he’s_ never had an answer, so he’s pretty sure none exists.

Mikey’s mouth curves into a half-smile, less like Gabe said something funny and more like the joke’s on him. "If you keep moving fast enough, nobody is going to ask you how you feel." He tilts his head, glancing up to see Gabe’s face, and his smile gets even a little more bittersweet. "Always keep moving, man. Always."

He pushes away from Gabe, straightening and starting off down the alley, swaying a little as he goes. "Come on," he calls back over his shoulder. "We should get back."  
**  
Gabe takes his advice; they keep moving. Never stop, never think. Stop moving means stop breathing, means be forced to exist in a way neither of them wants to be. Better to keep spinning through the higher levels, where everything’s filtered through a glass.

New Mexico, out in the desert under a sky so big and clear it doesn’t matter if they’re moving or not, because it’s impossible to feel anything but insignificant, even before smoking everything they had that would let them feel warm and safe and slow.

Actually Gabe smokes everything; Mikey drinks from a flask, staring up at that freaky too-clear sky with his jaw set tight, like he’s challenging the universe to do its worst. But the booze does its thing, it serves a purpose; by the time he runs out, he’s still looking up but he mostly just looks tired. Maybe a little sad.

"I should go back to Jersey," Gabe says, running his fingers through the dirt.

"You can’t go back until you’re done."

"Done with what? And the fuck I can’t."

"I won’t let you." Mikey goes to take another drink, remembers that the flask is empty, and tosses it onto the ground. "You have to stay until you’re done."

"Done with _what_?"

Mikey looks at him, and what he sees when he meets his eyes sends a weird jolt through Gabe, like somebody walked up behind him and pushed hard. It’s a moment of disorienting _awareness_ , that they’ve stopped moving, and that out here under the big open indifferent universe they can’t even pretend that at least they’re still pretty.

It’s seeing the bare skull of life, under the skin, and Gabe desperately needs Mikey to say something because he’s not sure he can stand that in silence.

"Being fucked-up," Mikey says, finally looking away. "You don’t have to be done being sad or whatever, but you have to be done being fucked-up about it, or I won’t let you go."

"Listen to you. Mr. Zen Master."

"I prefer Yoda."

"I bet you do. In bed." The joke doesn’t have any weight and neither of them laughs; it just kind of falls awkwardly to the sand. "What about you?"

Mikey raises an eyebrow, something dark and dangerous in his expression blurred by the alcohol. "What about me?"

It would be easy to push it, to pick the fight, but it isn’t his place and this isn’t the time. He’s starting to think that Mikey’s all broken glass and lighter fluid under the skin, but that’s his business if he doesn’t want it to be anybody else’s. He’s not bleeding yet.

"What are you going to do when the tour’s done?" he asks instead. "When you go home."

Mikey shrugs. "Do laundry and then pack again for Warped, I guess."

Gabe nods. "Awesome." He sits up, bracing himself against the sick slow spin of the world. "Hey. C’mere--" He reaches for Mikey’s arm and pulls him in, kissing his reluctant mouth until he gives in, and then pulls them both down into the dirt. Mikey starts to move on top of him, hands sliding down Gabe’s chest toward his jeans, but Gabe shakes his head, tugging at his sleeve until he looks at him.

"Let’s chill a minute," he says, and shrugs at Mikey’s confused look. "Just a minute. C’mon." After a minute Mikey relaxes, settling in the curve of Gabe’s arm with his head resting against Gabe’s chest.

They both look up at the billion dead-eyed stars that don’t give a fuck anyway.

"Crazy," Mikey mumbles after a while. "When you think about what’s out there."

"Yeah." Gabe’s quiet for a minute, feeling his heart beating against the pressure of Mikey’s weight, feeling Mikey’s heart beating back against his own. "You know what’s out there right now? Heading toward us?"

"An alien invasion force?"

"Not an invasion force. Just one spaceship." Gabe points up, choosing one dark space between the lights. "Right there. Coming right toward us. This one spaceship, and it’s, like…it’s being flown by a magic being. An awesome alien."

"An alien or a robot?"

"An _alien_. A giant…a fucking giant alien cobra."

Mikey snorts, rubbing his cheek against Gabe’s chest. "You and your fucking snake fetish, man."

"Shut up or I won’t tell you the rest of the story."

"There’s a story?"

"Yeah." Gabe nods, looking up at the stars. "See, he’s coming to Earth for a reason."  
**  
It rains in Phoenix, which is an exciting change of pace. They have the whole afternoon to kill, and the other guys head off in search of comic books and cigarettes and a WalMart. Gabe and Mikey stay behind, sitting on folding chairs under the awning on the side of the bus and watching the rain come down.

Gabe has a guitar balanced across his lap; it's Ray's fourth-best, or something, but there were still a lot of threats of bodily harm attached to borrowing it. He rolls absently through fingering exercises, frowning down at the dirt like he's going to find a song written there that will show him what to do next.

"Play something with an actual chord sometime today, please," Mikey mumbles. He's sitting with his legs stretched out just shy of getting into the rain, his hood flipped up to hide his face. Gabe can picture the line between his eyebrows, though; it's been there for about three days, the stretch of time that Mikey's been saying he has a headache and snarling at any attempt at conversation.

That included his bandmates, and his brother; since about the middle of day two, Gerard has been spending a lot of time staring intently at Mikey like he's trying to get him to say or do something specific using only the power of his mind, and Gabe's not entirely sure how much longer that can go on before Mikey snaps and kills him. It's going to be messy, and he'd kind of like to not be around for it.

He obediently picks out a few desultory chords, not wanting to draw any wrath down on himself. "You want to play? I've got nothing."

"Nah." Mikey hunches his shoulders a little, worrying the cuff of his sweatshirt between his fingers. "I'm not the artistic input of this operation."

"You're the brains, right? Or maybe the pretty face."

Mikey gives him an unamused look, but Gabe counters with blowing him a kiss, which earns a smile. "Something like that, I guess."

"Do you want to be?" Gabe rolls through another fingering exercise, then checks himself and plays the riff of "Say It Ain't So." "The artistic input, I mean."

That gets a slight shrug. "It doesn't really bother me. I just want to play, I don't need it to be, like, all mine. I just want to get to go out and...be a part of it. I guess that's the opposite of it being mine. I just want to fit into it for a little while."

Gabe nods slowly, playing a few more chords more or less at random while he turns that around in his head. "That's...really fucking Zen, yet again, dude."

"It was mine first, you know?"

Gabe looks up from the guitar. Mikey said that with just a little bit of heat, even though he's still sitting tucked away in his hoodie like an owl and staring out at the rain like it's no big deal. "What was?"

"Music. The scene, or whatever." Mikey glances over at him and shrugs again, his mouth setting in a tight, almost defiant little line before he speaks again. "It was mine first. I know that. And I get to have it, so...so the rest of it's all whatever. No big deal."

Gabe has no idea what to say to that, so he nods and bends his head, pretending to concentrate on the strings. Mikey falls silent, dragging his heel through the dirt to draw lines and x's. The wind picks up, threatening to send the rain splashing in over them, but they don't move.

After a while Mikey looks up again, snapping his fingers. "Do that again."

"What?"

"That thing you just did. Play it again." Gabe does, slowly, and Mikey nods a little. "You were singing something, too."

"I don't have real lyrics, it's just kind of..."

"Do it again."

"It's just self-pitying emo stream-of-consciousness bullshit." Mikey gives him a look that's borderline scary. "Okay, okay. Don't...bite me or anything."

He makes it up as he goes along, the bare-bones guitar chords giving a spine to a rambling thread about being tired of waiting, sick of his own voice, ready to give up and give in to the game. It's somewhere between bitter and sad, in a way that makes him want to squirm in his seat, except he's hanging on to the guitar. He's hanging on _tight_ , actually; when he finally strums out an arbitrary last chord and stops, his fingers ache from clenching tight against the frets and the strings.

Mikey sits still for a long moment, looking out at where it isn't really raining much anymore.

"Yeah," Gabe says finally, laughing a little. "Yeah, there's nothing there, man. I was just making that up, it isn't even--"

Mikey gets to his feet, tucking his hands in the pocket of his hoodie. "You're good, Saporta."

He didn't say it like a general description. "What?"

"You can go home if you want." Gabe stares at him in blank confusion, and Mikey's face slowly breaks into a smile. "Remember, previous edition of Yoda bullshit, about how you couldn't go home until you were done being fucked-up? You're done. You're good to go. Get out of here. I mean, if you want."

"You think that whiny bullshit was a sign that I'm _done_ being fucked-up?"

"You said it out loud." Mikey opens the door and climbs back onto the bus, groaning a little as the air conditioning hits him. "You wouldn't have done that if I left your ass back in Jersey to brood. I'm gonna take a nap."

Gabe sits out under the awning for a while longer, running through the simple chords until his fingers know them, cleaning up the edges a little, working the lyrics back and forth in his head. They're raw, and he thinks he wants to keep some of that but not all of it, there are a few things he wants to change, to tweak, to--

Fuck, he _wants_ to write a song. He actually honest to God wants to.

"Fuck Mikey Way for always being right," he tells the dirt, and goes inside the bus. He leaves Ray's guitar on the table--not as good as putting it back in its case, but acceptable--and goes back to the bunks, pushing the curtain over Mikey's open and crawling in next to him.

"I think you made a wrong turn somewhere," Mikey says, and Gabe shakes his head, tugging him over onto his back and kissing him before he can say anything else.

Mikey wraps his leg around both of Gabe's, holding him tight against him while they kiss for a long time, nearly silent and nearly still in the bunk. Finally Gabe breaks away, resting his forehead against Mikey's for a moment before he lifts his head enough to grin down at him.

"I think I'm going to call it 'Being From Jersey Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry.'"

Mikey laughs out loud, pulling Gabe down again and using his shoulder to muffle the sound. "Awesome," he says. "That's fucking awesome, dude."

"Fuck yeah." Gabe kisses him again, deeper. "We've gotta make sure people understand the truth. It's a sacred duty."

Mikey traces his fingers along Gabe's jaw. "You going to head home or stick around?"

"I'll finish out the tour." He runs his hand down Mikey's chest, resting it over his heart. "I don't miss my shitty apartment yet. And I'd hate to screw you over."

"That's not what I've heard at all."

"I don't have sex in bunks, man. I would never get the kink out of my back."

"You don't _deserve_ to be a rock star," Mikey sighs. "I'm disappointed in you."

There's really no possible response to that but to bite him. Mikey bites back, and they both collapse laughing, and for the first time since Gabe cares to remember, it feels like things might work out okay.  



End file.
